(2005) Side Story – Page 08

The earliest pages of Culture Shock were in black and white because I liked working with markers. Of course, you can do color with markers, but it gets expensive really fast… and I was just a poorly-paid lifeguard at the time. There were a few attempts along the way to find a good way to do color, but it didn’t really gel until I started inking and filling in Macromedia Flash, which smoothed my lines and vectorized everything nicely.

This side story was done the way I do all pages in Flash and Photoshop, but in black and white to accommodate for being printed in the Drunk Duck Anthology. I was worried about how well the shades and gradients would work in print, but they turned out just fine. It occurs to me that my incompetence for backgrounds worked in my favor here because even on paper and without color, the panels remained readable. It was mostly because of contrasty foreground elements in front of simple backgrounds.